Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday March 23, 2014 @11:36AM
from the worshipping-moist-temples dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Vanderbilt researchers say they've shown it's possible to selectively manipulate our ability to learn by applying a mild electrical current to the brain. Using an elastic headband that secured two electrodes conducted by saline-soaked sponges to the cheek and the crown of the head, the researchers applied 20 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to each subject. Depending on the direction of the current, subjects either learned more quickly, slower, or in the case of a sham current, with no change at all. The [paywalled] study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience."

I don't want to come off sounding like I endorse the practice of randomly fucking up people's brains, but this is how we get an understanding of how the brain really works. We'll try this to see what happens, then we'll think about the brain some more and we'll try something else to see what happens and eventually we'll work out what's actually going on.

Let me 'splain it to you, Looshy - He meant that as a joke about how, with all the mind-opening intoxicants available on our planet, we almost exclusively stick with one that does nothing but make us slower and dumber. We choose the blue pill over the red pill.

Alternately, he may simply have meant that the very fact that we enjoy intoxicants in the first place suggests we want to dumb ourselves down. Again, same outcome.

A euphoric reaction can easily be created from a slightly different positioning of the electrodes. Think about it: euphoria combined with the inability to learn = instant panty dropper = huge profit for whoever can invent a social situation where everyone puts one on. Look at how much money alcohol makes, and they can't target different experiences.

I do think that alcohol lovers seem to be extraordinarily quick to case aspersions against anyone who posits an opinion that threatens their way of life. It must have something to do with their repetitive use of a substance that dulls their ability to learn.

lol...really?? that's exactly what "experts" said about self-driving cars just 6 or 7 year ago...it was an impossible task.

read "The 2nd Machine Age" and "The Singularity Is Near"...the Technium is growing at a non-linear, exponential rate which mean linear approximations of where technology is taking us is radically off target, even projecting just 6-8 years into the future. using simple math and an x^2 growth rate, in 4 years the Technium will be (16 - 4 ) 12 TIMES further along then what most people can

The only thing I can picture when you use so much 'lol's in your writing is that you're a long-haired afghan hound with it's tongue lolling around in it's mouth... because clearly it's not attached to much of a brain!

That's not an attack. It's a comment about how I can't even read what you're saying because of the visual I'm getting. See, the connie provides the dog link to Collies, the lingus for the tongue, the lol the lolling, oh wait, you're right, the lol provides a hint of stupidity as well.

The Singularity is just another type of slippery slope argument. Some foolish "experts" draw an exponential curve and say it intersects with infinity in ~50 years. Everyone who studies reality knows that as the speed of anything increases so does the resistance. That's why if you drop something out of an airplane it doesn't accelerate to infinite speed, and neither does technological progression.

i guess Moore's law is too, right?...and the fact that you currently have an 80's Cray supercomputer sitting in your pocket says nothing about the rate of change.

very very few people in the 80's could have even begun to predict that.

and you must be trolling...to say Ray Kurtzweil [wikipedia.org] is just some "foolish expert" is to be utterly clueless about the history of technology, and shows how little you know about much of anything.

he probably did more before breakfast this morning then you will achieve in your entire

Wow, connie, it seems like all you're really saying is that you believe in the singularity, which, unfortunately, we all already knew. Yes, Moore's law is no more a law than Occam's razor. Moore's law is just a principal that works until it doesn't.

I see a car outside my window right now driving on the highway at 65mph. So I'm coining the term "Ablaze's law" right now that says that that car will just keep driving at 65mph forever. Ablaze's law will probably work for quite a while, certainly long enough for

i never said I believe in The Singularity and obviously know that Moore's Law is a misnomer...it's more like a prediction that has so far been quite accurate.

i did say, however, that I believe Ray Kurtzweil is a genius, and knows more about engineering and technology then probably the entire userbase of slashdot combined. a quick look at his long list of serious technical achievements proves this beyond a reasonable doubt, altho i'm sure there are people here who are fantastical engineers. this is fact.

to say Ray Kurtzweil is just some "foolish expert" is to be utterly clueless about the history of technology

Ray Kurtzweil is a very smart man. He is also a very sad man who thinks would be a good and practical idea to have a computer imitate his dead father. He's actually quite a pathetic -- in the sense of moving one to pity -- figure, unable to come to terms with basic truths about existence.

We're already soaking in the Vingean singularity: anyone with a smartphone and a data connection has effective I

anyone with a smartphone and a data connection has effective Intelligence Amplification

Woah, rein your horses my man! Having a smartphone doesn't make anyone more intelligent, quite the contrary indeed, if I'm to believe what I see everyday in the street, public transports, restaurants, social events etc. The ability to find more information faster may provide Knowledge Amplification, but it has nothing to do with the Intelligence of the person that carries the smartphone. I'd say the smartphone is more int

If as the speed of anything increases, so does the resistance, why are galaxies speeding away from each other at an ever-increasing rate?

Technically they aren't. Technically they are getting further apart without moving away from each other at all (if you average momentum). But I expect you just threw that in there as a red herring, since even if galaxies were moving away from each other it does nothing to refute my claim that at some point in the future they would encounter a resistive force and stop accelerating at such a rate.

Singularity is a religion and nothing you say will ever convince the true believers.

Exponential progress is simply put an idiotic theory that fails at so many levels _even_ for the tour de force of technology: that of computers in general and silicon based microchips in particular. Waving ones hand and uttering the "SINGULARITY" mantra doesn't change scientific fact sadly.

I think you mean social, not physical reality. Aristarchus of Samos's heliocentric theory was more "real" than the epicyclists; yet he had trouble getting anyone to accept it, because the social reality of the time was so fixated on geocentrism.

In the same way, Mendel's ideas correlated with reality, but the social reality of his time prevented him from getting stuff done.

Wegener is another example.

I think you're guilty of naive realism [wikipedia.org], which fails when it comes to quantum physics, for example.

Not that this is even remotely related to what you're talking about. I don't if I'd even describe what you're suggesting as "rapidly approaching" We barely understand the very rudimentary aspects of the brain, much less how "Thought" gets made. But I do concede that should we survive long enough as as a society then yes, something like this will come along and someone bad will use it for bad things. So what do you propose we do? Make it illegal? That wont stop North Korea from doing anything. Ban research?

There was no indication that this device can determine *what* was learned, much less that false information can be implanted. It just helps or hinders people in the speed with which they learn. Your comment is just tinfoil hat ranting, which I don't recommend you wear when they strap you in and put one of these things on your head. Do you have a source for anything that even potentially matches your dire warning?

The Greeks must have said about the same to Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC. There was no evidence of parallax motion of the stars, therefore the earth didn't move around the sun. But their instruments just weren't sensitive enough to detect the parallax.

And of course it was wildly implausible that the earth was not the center of the universe. So even though Aristarchus was right, he was dismissed and science was set back some two millenia. That's the risk you run by being so dismissive. Instea

Hardly. Why would all those universities and their employees want to take a 50% paycut just so you can complete your degree in half the time?

If you found a way to double the number of educated people in every field, I'm sure it would have economic advantages, but it would also depress the wages in every field as there would be twice the supply of workers and definitely not twice the demand.

Your comment about how to shed chronic fatigue by using the body "properly" is arrogant and misguided at best. Chronic fatigue can be caused by a chemical imbalance, or other medical condition, and all the yoga and body alignment and core work will not cure it. Not that I'm advocating a jolt of electric current through the brain will.

There is much we don't know, but I don't think we have to start wearing our Aluminum foil hats 24/7 just yet.

This seems analogous to grabbing a smartphone, connecting a wire to some metal part, plugging that wire directly into a 120 V AC source, and hoping that the smartphone works better afterwards. Yes, smartphones have electricity running through them, too, but what you're doing isn't like to be productive.

We're only going to be able to safely operate on the brain when we can stably reprogram individual neural networks. That's the model we're going to have to have of the brain. Something on the order of sophistication of microchip and circuit designers with a cadre of millions of neuroprogrammers. Brain programming might one day be the growth field. We can't have opinions of how the brain might work. We need to have facts about how the brain does work, in minute detail.

I disagree. The inventors of the trebuchet had no idea about the Higgs, the inventors of the windmill didn't understand Bernoulli's work, and the first people to take Valerian root had no concept of biochemistry. We can use observed patterns to serve our needs without understanding the reasons for those patterns. Yes a lot of people died eating random plants, but there are a lot of us, and we learn quickly. My favorite part about engineering is using techniques to solve problems that no one understands yet. Its like magic. The best is when a true subject matter expert tells me "that shouldn't work!" and yet it does. Science always catches up and we are the better for it, but that is no reason to proceed with caution when we have so many people, and so much to learn. I would qualify this by saying test subjects should be informed and consenting.

My objections are evidenced throughout this thread: For example, someone wants to go to Radio Shack and spend $15 to build his very own brain stimulator. Hopefully nothing goes wrong but the cost to society of people with damaged or malfunctioning brains in a lot more than $15. People with damaged or malfunctioning brains can commit murder or become a ward of the state. That's liable to cost society more like in the millions.

You don't go to Radio Shack and build a kidney dialysis machine for $15, and I don'

Can and will are two very different things. Just like you can go out and masturbate in front of the city hall in daylight, you (most likely) will not. Just like someone can fry their moral parts of his brain, doesn't mean he will (most likely fry some other portion, or a big portion altogether...if he manages to fry it in the first place). If everything happens with the merest possibilities, we'd either have a big black hole where the earth is right now, or you would've won the jackpot many times over.

Listen, I'm all for advancing technology and taking risks, but this particular application has the potential to do very real harm to the test subjects. It's one thing if the researchers put themselves at risk, but putting others at risk because of our own ignorance is unacceptable. I would suggest we do such experiments on animal brains until we have a more thorough understanding of whether or not they'll have serious consequences for human brains.

We can't have opinions of how the brain might work. We need to have facts about how the brain does work, in minute detail.

Isn't that precisely what this research result is all about? It's not like they're hawking a product. We knew learning was affected by electrical currents already. Slashdot covered that story. One presumes this result fines that down in terms of what parts of the brain are involved. Or possibly it broadens the study group. I don't know since I can't read the article, but it's going to be something like that. It's research. Experimental research, rather than empty hypothesizing. These researchers are learning how the brain works, and whether or not it's a "delicate organ" as you claim. You only have a hypothesis. They're finding out.

The task in the study that the subjects had to learn is one specifically tailored to make use of the brain area stimulated. Whether this can help in, for example, memorizing the contents of a book remains to be seen.

This electronic thinking cap seems like it will be slightly more pleasant than someone having "a little mental handicap radio in his ear" which emits "some sharp noise to keep people... from taking unfair advantage of their brains."

For those that wish for the singularity, sadly there's a 50-50 chance of it slipping into a dystopian singularity of forced equality or a professional sports analogy to "The Dark Fields". These possibilities appear to be nearly upon us and we don't even seem realize it... The sp

Helmholtz coil in a hat is what you really want when said and done and all the regions are better understood.Want to learn a new physical skill.. setting A, polarity YAbout to drive in hazard conditions.. setting B, AC [cycle-time, intensity, loc_data,...]...